


The Vices of Old Men

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-15
Updated: 2008-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:52:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victory and defeat shadow one another--in Damascus, and in Deraa. (Slight film-AU, attempt at historical canon.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vices of Old Men

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Vashtan, for a quick edit, endless patience with my babbling, and boundless encouragement; thanks to La Reine Noire, Reconditarmonia, the_red_shoes, and Assimbya for helping me to discover what I loved about this fic.
> 
> Written for Cousin Shelley

 

 

By night, he can see the candles lit in the windows of Damascus--the lamps with their colored shades, the fires over which mothers cook lentils for their children. He had never thought about the lights, in England; he had never thought about them in Cairo, where electricity crackled in the wires and shone from the homes of the wealthy. (The lights are still out, in the parts of the city where men walk armed. A light is a target, and in Damascus, men and women have not yet forgotten how to keep themselves safe from violence.) There is an appreciable quality to the darkness, without the ubiquitous luxury of streetlamps. The darkness is as clean as the night sky.

He sits with one ankle hooked over his knee, a notebook balanced on the shelf of his calf. At times, Lawrence lets his pen hover over the paper, as though in consideration of what to write, but the nib never quite touches. Today's leaf remains as pristine as his white robes, on which the blood hardly shows any longer. He has washed them carefully to ensure that this is so.

In the stillness of a broken city, he refuses to reflect upon the council meetings and the knife fights and the occasional pop of gunfire in the darkness. These are the mechanisms by which men create order from the disordered, the strategies by which little human consciousnesses insist upon their primacy in a larger conflict; they have nothing to do with him. He has nothing to do with _them_. A single man, in communion with his own lamp and that little square of sky and city visible through the window, can have a peace that the larger world is denied.

In an hour, perhaps, he will retire to his bed. Perhaps he will draft some missive instead, in English or in Arabic, which will request help from this officer or report success to that sherif. It is the way of this war; he has drenched himself in the blood of men who might have been his countrymen, but for an accident of birth, and for that sacrifice he has been handed everything he has ever wished to receive.

The British had already handed over Damascus to Nuri as-Said, when Lawrence's Arabs had whirled in with their banners and guns and crossed to the banks of the Barada. While the Australians and the Welsh who had captured the city stood by without expression, Lawrence had accepted word of the Turkish surrender on behalf of his Arab irregulars. The Barada had glittered like good plate in the high sunlight.

Dimashq ash-Shaam belongs to the Arabs, through no fault of their own.

Once more, his pen hovers over the paper. _The victory is ours to dash against the ground, and in our contempt, we may do so_ \--there is a pleasing bombast to the sentence, although he cannot draft it. Or _Within these mutilated streets, I have heard the wounded crying for aid. Saidiyya, they cry, just as African beggars cry for alms_ \--but he has never heard beggars crying 'Saidiyya,' in Damascus or in Africa, and the exaggeration sits poorly with him tonight. _I fear that I am drowning_ , he wishes to write. _Save me--I beg you, save me._

Lawrence withdraws the pen and chews upon the end of it. He closes the little notebook, tightening his fingers upon the soft skin of the leather binding. If he wished to, he could score that leather deeply with the tip of his pen, leaving gashes full of ink; the image would soothe him, he thinks. These wounds would afford him a kind of peace.

He hears footsteps in the hall behind him. The instinct for survival bids him turn his head, assess the potential threat; he is still El-Aurens, still the hero of Aqaba, although he could not give the Arabs (Dimashq ash-Shaam? Damascus? Whose name should he use?).

Lawrence's eyes remain trained upon the darkness below him.

"You have not eaten." The voice is low, hoarse--a fire earlier had seen even the sherifs hauling water, or waving their pistols and demanding that others haul water. If he turned, Lawrence thinks, he would see that Ali's robes are smeared with ash, and his eyes veined red. Therefore, he does not turn.

"I had a bit of bread. A bit of water," he answers. It is not quite a deliberate fast, and yet he thinks that without deliberation, this starvation nonetheless shares some of the qualities of a fast. He finds himself closer to what is pure, to what is divine with a low, insistent pain gnawing at his belly.

Ali makes an inarticulate noise, wordless and dismissive, and strides across the floor to sit at Lawrence's side. There is no second chair at this desk, and so he takes his seat upon the sparse rug at the floor. Lawrence can hear him slowly settling his clothing so that it will not wrinkle or stain; even here, in this broken city, with his own person in disarray, Ali still has the dignity of a prince. The thought brings a smile to Lawrence's lips, and he finds the sensation of it strange to the muscles of his cheeks. _I cannot remember the last time that I have smiled without bitterness,_ he might have written, but it would in some sense be a lie; he remembers the moment with perfect clarity. It is everything between then and now that he refuses to remember.

He had said that he was invincible, and dressed himself up to play the Circassian, and smiled as though he had never known despair.

"We will rebuild what they have destroyed," says Ali; for a moment, Lawrence forgets that he is speaking of Damascus.

* * *

They leave Deraa before the horizon grows light, and no words pass between them.

On the long ride back to the snow-tipped mountains, Lawrence keeps his eyes trained upon the stones beneath his camel's feet. The rocks have been worn smooth by wind and cold, freezing and melting ice; he can feel the shards of ice driven against his own cheeks, roughening them. He tightens his blanket around his shoulders, although on some level he is grateful for the cold. It has numbed his back so that he scarcely feels the scrape of coarse cloth on raw skin.

There are tiny clumps of vegetation caught among the stones. They are dull, compared to the lush riot of green that is an English garden in springtime--but in this dull country, they are as fiercely vivid. He thinks that he could easily love such huddles of greenness, staring after them with a queer hunger in the hollow of his chest. He could look upon them until their afterimages flash blood-red when he closes his eyes.

Ahead of him, Ali says nothing. He has said nothing since he dragged Lawrence from the mud, which suggests that he knows full well what preceded his discovery. Indeed, the swiftness of that rescue suggests that it was not a discovery at all, but rather the collection of a thing already found. For this, as well, Lawrence is grateful. He cannot begin to imagine explaining himself.

It feels as though someone has cracked the top off of his skull and left him open to the elements. He would be no more defenseless and empty if he were the broken fortress in which they will take shelter; indeed, he would be less empty, for at least there is a fire waiting in the fortress's belly. There are people--he recalls this, dimly--there are people who had laughed, once. There were prayers rising at evening.

* * *

When at last Lawrence brings himself to look away from the window, he finds Ali regarding him with that peculiar restless tranquility which is characteristic of the man. His eyes are indeed bloodshot, and his face smudged with ash. He wears a simple gutra and cord agal, as the British do when they wish to appear more like Arabs. "You are not writing," he observes, leaning forward just an inch.

If this were some Oriental romance, Lawrence thinks, he would find himself transfixed by the intensity of Ali's dark eyes as he regards Lawrence through his lashes. Perhaps he would raise his hand to brush Ali's cheek, smoothing away ash and sweat, and perhaps Ali would lean into his touch and close his eyes.

It is only a mad fantasy. He breathes out. "I'm not," he answers, without the guilt of an admission. "I'd been watching the lights."

"You see the hope of Arabia in them," Ali says, climbing to his feet to regard the lights of Damascus.

"I see nothing."

"You see yourself."

Lawrence laughs, and he puts aside his notebook at last. "Very well--I see myself, and I see nothing. They are one and the same."

Once, Ali would have snapped that they were _not_ ; in his expression, the particular flash of his eyes and the flaring of his nostrils, the parting of his lips, there is the suggestion that he wishes to do so even now. He is ugly in his restraint. It marks him as civilized.

Ali gathers himself, closing his hands over Lawrence's with great care. His hands, too, are ash-stained. "We did not come to Damascus to condemn it. If we must tear it apart and build it again with our own hands, we will. Nor did I bring you back to condemn you--if I must tear you apart and build you again--"

"I do believe that you would. I believe you, Ali." This is not a romance, and yet he draws Ali's hands to his lips to kiss the knuckles. "But will the Harith and the Howeitat ever stop coming to blows over the utilities? Will the Christians and the Muslims in Damascus ever truly be partners? We are torn to pieces--utterly torn to pieces. I am _tired_ of it, Ali. I am only one man."

"But we are two men," Ali answers at once, gripping Lawrence's hand until he can feel the bones creaking. "I must believe that one man may control his own destiny, and two men--"

"And then the whole _bloody_ Arab Revolt, is that where this is leading?" Lawrence suddenly flings Ali's hand away, rising to his feet. They stand close, unbearably close; he can feel Ali's breath upon his lips, Ali's warmth upon his hands. For a moment, Lawrence wants nothing more than to strike the man across the face.

Before he can act upon the urge or quash it, Ali steps back. "We are two men," he repeats, folding his arms.

"Two men," Lawrence agrees softly, "But not united into one."

Again, he can see Ali restraining himself. The man's lips curl with suppressed speech; his hands clench just once, as though in a spasm. "We will speak of this later," he says, and turns at once to leave the room.

Lawrence watches the doorway for several minutes, after he has gone.

* * *

In Dimashq ash-Shaam, it is commonly known, intellectuals and Arab partisans have been hanged for their sympathies--not only because they have spoken words that Emir Said finds distasteful, moreover, but because they have spoken those words beautifully, persuasively, after great thought. It strikes Lawrence as one of the more quietly terrible aspects of this war, that poets' silent deaths speak more eloquently than their words.

When he decides to accept Allenby's offer (or acquiesce to his command) to lead in the Big Push, he tastes _Damascus_ on his tongue and thinks to himself, _You have a body, like other men._

Perhaps his body can serve, if only to dangle symbolically from a noose or to lie riddled with bullets by the side of the road. The image is disquieting, more because it is beautiful than because it horrifies him.

He wonders whether the Turkish general had thought the same, peering down on Lawrence's pale, half-stripped body as the lash had come down. Whether he had found the welling blood aesthetically pleasing, signifying something that Lawrence cannot even begin to imagine.

From that removed vantage, he must admit: it is, in its way, a beautiful image.

"We'll get there before you do," he promises (Allenby, or the Turk, or whatever is following him).

He does not know that it is a lie; he never meant it to be a lie.

* * *

By the time Ali returns, Lawrence has curled up with his head on a roll of clothing and begun feigning sleep. In the darkness, the man's footfalls give him away; they fall in the same rhythm as before (as always), firm upon the ground. He can hear Ali hovering in the doorway, and hopes fervently that he will simply go away. At length, though, Ali enters and curls at Lawrence's side. "You are awake," he says, quietly. "Sleep."

"You told me that once before," says Lawrence.

"You did not listen, then."

In the new-moon darkness, they lie trading breath. "Do you think I'm the same man?" Lawrence asks. "The same man I was--" but he cannot bring himself to say, _before_ , let alone before _what_.

Ali is quiet. Their bodies mirror each other, lying curved on their sides, turned inward. Lawrence wonders if he, too, is remembering the evening when Lawrence had laughed and offered him money while his hands had trembled madly at his sides. His hands are trembling now. He wishes that Ali would reach out to them and still them; it is alien to him, this longing for contact.

"You ask as though you cannot answer it," says Ali, when the silence has stretched unbearably between them.

"I can't. I simply can't."

"Would you ask this, if we had stolen Damascus from beneath the Turks? If this had been a swift victory, and not a victory for which we must work for many years?"

To still his fingers, Lawrence reaches across the space that separates them and presses Ali's hand. Ali's fingers are warm against his own, and slightly slick with oil (not scented; from eating, rather than from cleansing away the stink of ash). "We would've had the same delay whether or not we had taken Damascus ourselves. The whole place needs to be rebuilt."

"But you would have known the taste of victory again."

He draws in a sharp breath; it sounds faintly in his ears, like a gasp or a sob. "That's what Aurens is to you, isn't it? What _I_ am. The taste of victory."

All at once, Ali snaps. "That is what you are to yourself!" he cries, pressing Lawrence to the floor and holding his hands still against a tangle of cloth. "You believe that you are _nothing_ , that you can be nothing, without victory--and you try to convince a defeated people that we must rise up against the victors! You are a fraud, Lawrence--you have lied to us from the beginning."

In that giddy moment, he can feel the earth moving beneath them. The air seems to grow thin and still, and his heart pounds madly against the bars of his chest. His voice surprises him; it is too steady, too evenly pitched. "I haven't lied. I've only told you something that I didn't believe."

Ali's lips press against his own, briefly. The kiss is as chaste as a brother's, and yet Lawrence trembles like a leaf at the touch. "The man who has been destroyed can speak to a scattered people, and earn their love when he tells them that they must rise up again. I love that man, if he believes it," he murmurs, "and I fear him, if he cannot."

* * *

For October 3, the entry reads only, _Damascus._

There is no text beyond that. 

 


End file.
